Did the prehistoric equivalent of a great big, beery, boozy party give rise to some of the world’s earliest civilizations? That sounds about as likely as Sarah Palin rolling up her sleeves and deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls. And yet, that idea–beer as one of the original jet fuels of civilization–is gathering momentum among archaeologists, and not just when they are in their cups. Continue reading
This has been a bad year for contrarian cosmology. First Geoffrey Burbidge died, at the age of 84, on January 26. And now comes the news that Allan Sandage, also 84, died last Saturday.
I’ll let other obituaries explore Sandage’s monumental scientific biography at length and in depth: apprenticing under Edwin Hubble; assuming Hubble’s observing program after his death in 1953; recalibrating the distances to galaxies and, therefore, the scale and age of the universe; compiling the Hubble Atlas of Galaxies; making the first observation of a quasar; collaborating on a paper positing the formation process of the Milky Way. He was the last of the lone astronomers, those gods of Mounts Wilson and Palomar, doing daily battle with the abyss. Sandage once defined cosmology as “the search for two numbers”—the current rate of the expansion of the universe, and how much that rate is changing over time. Know those numbers, he declared, and you would know the alpha and the omega of the universe: its age and its fate.
For me, though, his death also brings to mind a quieter, less celebratory subject that has nagged at me for years: the relationship between individual psychology and the scientific method.
Cameras are nifty. They take a slice of the hustle and bustle of real life and dip it in liquid nitrogen, preserving it for eternity (or as long as our hard drives last). But they can’t do everything. Try taking a picture of the moon or the stars or a particularly lovely sunset. If you’re an amateur like me, you know that too often the image you see with your eyes doesn’t match the image you capture. It’s frustrating. Continue reading
I think this is funny because it explains a problem I’ve had with math all along, which is that math just makes stuff up: makes up number, and space between numbers, and relations between numbers, and I’m not even mentioning zero. Also I know that the horizon problem went something like, the universe shouldn’t have been born as uniform as it was because it was farther across than light — which created the uniformity — could have traveled by then. Something like that. So AG’s mathematicians solve the problem by making light travel faster than light. For some reason, physicists resent that. Now that I reflect on it, I suspect that AG and I are the only ones who think this is funny.
Credit: http://abstrusegoose.com/316
This drop-dead gorgeous picture of the Nile taken from the International Space Station at the end of October prompted some science writers to muse on the enduring importance of the Nile to Egypt. Surrounded by the great darkness of the Eastern and Western deserts, the Nile literally shines like a beacon of light in this image, the source of life in a hostile land.
Evocative as the photo is, however, it fails to capture the truth, or at least the whole truth. While the Greek historian Herodotus once called Egyptian civilization “the gift of the Nile,” the last two decades or so of research in Egypt’s deserts has shown us that this is far too simple a view. In fact, were it not for the Western Desert–a land of suffocating winds and summer temperatures up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit–we might never have had the glories of the New Kingdom, including Tutankhamun’s famous tomb. Continue reading
A book I just read said that while the sun once held a gloriously central place in the lives of men, it has now been sidelined and downgraded by science — which I disagree with, you can’t find a more dedicated sun worshipper than a solar scientist. The book’s complaint is standard English major stuff, that science with all its measuring and calculating has taken from nature its meaning and mystery, its poetry. Best example: Walt Whitman’s famous poem about hearing a “learn’d astronomer” talk about proofs and diagrams until he (Walt) got sick and tired; and “rising and gliding out,” he wrote, “I wander’d off by myself/In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time/Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars” ‑‑ the implication being that he (Walt) and not the astronomer appreciated the stars’ true inner poetry.
I too have heard the learn’d astronomer and my opinion is that Walt would have been better off if he had quit gliding around and learn’d a little science.
About ten years ago I was killing time in the sprawling Barnes & Noble on Union Square in Manhattan. I had pushed my chair away from a little table, crossed my legs, and opened a book on my lap. I don’t remember which book. I can’t even remember whether it was one I’d grabbed off a shelf or, because I was deep in research at that time, one I’d been carrying around all day just in case I found myself with a few free minutes. I do remember that I was trying to understand what gravity is. Or, as I was beginning to appreciate, isn’t.
Because I don’t have a background in science, I pretty much have to start from scratch when I’m researching a topic. In my investigations into gravity, I’d already discovered that Isaac Newton had been making it up as he went along, and that he had admitted as much in one of his letters to the theologian Richard Bentley. The notion of a force of attraction existing between two distant objects, he wrote, is “so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.” Yet fall into it subsequent generations of physicists did. Nearly two centuries later, the German philosopher-scientist Ernst Mach wrote, “The Newtonian theory of gravitation, on its appearance, disturbed almost all investigators of nature because it was founded on an uncommon unintelligibility.” Now, he went on, “it has become common unintelligibility.”
Yesterday I shared a room with 3,000 buzzing tsetse flies – the bugs that carry the sleeping sickness parasite.
Tsetse flies live in Africa, but these guys are Yalies. They buzz and breed in racks of mesh cages on the 6th floor of Yale’s School of Public Health. (They also recite some Goethe – it’s the Ivy League, after all). By studying their inner workings, scientists like Serap Askoy hope to figure out how to stop them from spreading the parasite. Continue reading
